If you were going to design a prospect in a lab with the sole purpose of them living under a microscope, you couldn’t do much better than Vladimir Guerrero Jr.
From his youth, prospect rankings and minor-league results, to his can’t-miss size and batting practice laser shows, Guerrero Jr. has invited intense scrutiny since the moment he arrived at the major-league level. With early-career production that’s fallen short of expectations, that scrutiny hasn’t exactly eased up.
The cherry on top of all that, of course, is his famous name — which brings with it comparisons to one of the most beloved ballplayers in recent memory. Although junior and senior are very different from their physical makeup to their defensive abilities, it’s not hard to see shades of dad in the youngster’s swing.
For instance, take the fourth home run of Guerrero Jr.’s career. On a pitch inside, he uses his ridiculous bat speed to swat it out of the ballpark effortlessly.
From the lightning-quick swing, to the moment of admiration for his work, it looks a lot like the type of home run his father used to hit.
Will Leitch of MLB.com said the following about the two swings in a piece about players that need to be seen in person:
“You really can’t quite appreciate how much his swing can look like his father’s — how you are instantly transported back to that time, or how you can see a Hall of Famer you might have been too young to see in his time — until you watch it in the flesh. It’s uncanny.”
The idea that Guerrero Jr. has, at least in large part, inherited his father’s swing, is also supported by some of their batted-ball numbers — like the fact they spray the ball around the park in almost the exact same way.
To be fair, on Guerrero Sr.’s side these numbers come from 2002 on, when FanGraphs' access to batted-ball numbers begins, but that still covers 10 seasons in which he hit .317/.379/.535, won an MVP and made five All-Star Games. While it misses some of the good stuff, it still captures prime Vlad the Impaler.
If we buy the premise that father and son share similar swings, it’s worth asking if we can learn anything from the original that we can apply to the new model. Guerrero Jr. has been consistently dogged by questions about his launch angle and groundball rate, as well as the middle-of-the-road exit velocity he posted in his one full season.
We know that Guerrero Sr. was a monster at the plate, the question is whether he excelled despite some of the same swing issues Guerrero Jr. is facing and how similarly the two actually hit the ball.
To get a sense of how the ball came off Guerrero Sr.’s bat in more precise terms, we must try to convert his batted ball stats into Statcast equivalents. That takes some educated guessing, but we can get an idea. Launch angle is the number that has been his son’s bugaboo, and while we don’t have that for Guerrero Sr., we can find players who had similar line drive, groundball and flyball rates in the Statcast era (2015-2020). The players who jump off the page probably aren’t the names you’d expect.
If we average Miller and Maldonado’s career launch angles, we get 12.2 degrees, a number that would’ve ranked 76th among qualified hitters in 2020. That’s far from the platonic ideal for a power hitter, but it’s clear that the launch angle/groundball issue that has plagued junior didn’t apply to senior in the same way.
When it comes to exit velocity, the best numbers we have to go on are FanGraphs' quality of contact statistics. With the same method of matching Guerrero’s production to more recent players with Statcast data we spit out an interesting name.
Zobrist’s average exit velocity of 88.5 m.p.h. since 2015, is almost exactly league average which is a surprise as a comp for Guerrero Sr. However, the quality of contact stats have shifted a great deal since 2002, including adding a new method for their calculation in 2010, so perhaps a better way to look at it would be to see how Guerrero Sr. ranked against his peers.
Between 2002 and 2011 he was 128th by Hard-hit rate. The equivalent player in the Statcast era is Danny Santana whose career average exit velocity is 89.2 m.p.h. Split the difference between Zobrist and Santana and you've got 88.9 m.p.h. — which would’ve ranked 74th among qualified hitters in 2020, tied with Randal Grichuk.
The evidence we have suggests that Guerrero Sr. didn’t regularly hit the balls with the same force that his son did last year, when Vladito’s average exit velocity and Hard-hit rate were both in the 93rd percentile. Senior didn’t pile up home runs by being the Aaron Judge of his era, his secret was combining power (his HR/FB rate of 16.0 per cent was above-average for the time, but nothing like we see from sluggers today) with a ridiculous ability to avoid strikeouts.
While Guerrero Jr. runs well below-average strikeout rates, hitting 39 home runs and striking out less than 10 per cent of the time in a season — like Guerrero Sr. did in 2002 — just isn’t feasible anymore considering the way pitching in the game has improved.
It’s probable that the 22-year-old has more raw power than his father but channeling it into productive batted balls remains a challenge. In this era, his chances of raising his launch angle — as players like Christian Yelich and Francisco Lindor have done in recent years — are probably higher than striking out at an extremely low clip. A little more elevation could be the difference between groundballs and line drives, and result in a few more of his infamous wall-bashing singles clearing the fence.
If Guerrero Jr. has truly inherited his father’s swing, that should be possible. The patented Guerrero family hack is plenty capable of getting the ball in the air.
